The First Customer Problem
Why the customer that helps you get started can also be the one that holds you back
“Once we get them on board, the others will follow.”
I’ve heard this more times than I can count. A founder, a credible anchor customer behind them - an industry leader, a major OEM, a prime - and the quiet confidence that the hard part is done. If a name like that is willing to back you, the rest of the market will take notice.
True - the market will take notice. But notice isn’t the metric that matters. Engagement is.
Market-level Pain vs. Company-level Pain
A market-level pain repeats across a segment. Different organisations , different contexts, different procurement cycles - but the same underlying pain. If you’re solving one of these, you have the foundation for a great commercial strategy.
A company-level pain is real pain, but it’s just specific to one organisation. Solve it well and you have a customer, but not necessarily a market.
Early on, they’re almost impossible to tell apart. And a large, credible anchor customer makes it very easy to assume you already know which one you’re dealing with.
Their endorsement proves you can solve their version of the problem. It doesn’t prove the problem looks the same everywhere else. And it doesn’t mean their credibility transfers to procurement decisions at organisations with completely different priorities.
Usually you find that out later than you should.
What You’re Learning
Access to real users, real processes, real feedback on what the product needs to do - this is the thing most early-stage companies struggle to get.
The problem isn’t having an anchor customer. It’s what happens when their requirements become the development roadmap.
I was advising a startup last year developing AI-driven digital twin tools for aerospace structures. Novel technology solving a real pain. A large company got involved early to help accelerate development and become a future customer. By any measure, a good thing.
All development was being oriented around design and manufacturing use cases for a large engineering and manufacturing operation, because that’s who the anchor company was.
The problem was: would this translate to even bigger manufacturing operations? Or small company operations? Maybe, maybe not. The founding team didn’t know.
This technology also had potential use cases for in-service operations and MRO for structural health monitoring - arguably an even bigger longer-term market. This may have required developing the technology around different constraints and marketing with different positioning - was this true? Maybe, maybe not. The founding team didn’t know.
By the time commercialisation became the focus, the product was highly optimised for one customer and their context. It wasn’t clear how much of the broader market actually looked like their context, or what they were missing.
The question that should have been running in parallel the whole time - is this company’s problem the market’s problem? - hadn’t been asked.
Why Nobody Questions It
This isn’t a story about a bad decision. Every choice made sense.
The anchor relationship provides enough momentum to keep moving in a certain direction. Going out to the broader market feels premature when the product isn’t finished. The large company’s credibility makes their requirements feel representative.
And there’s something subtler: the founder’s proximity to the anchor customer means their vocabulary, their problem framing, even their definition of what good looks like starts to mirror that one organisation.
By the time you’re talking to buyer number two, you’re speaking a dialect only buyer number one fully understands, solving for nuances that only buyer number one has.
Conversations feel harder than they should. Objections come from unexpected directions. What worked before stops working, and it’s not obvious why.
That’s usually when the assumption gets questioned - later than it should have been.
What You Need to Find Out
The discipline that’s missing isn’t complicated to describe.
Talk to buyers you’re not already working with, early enough that what you learn can still change something. Not to validate what you’ve built. To find the variance.
Where does the problem look different from how your anchor customer described it? What does buyer number three care about that never came up with buyer number one? Which parts of your solution resonate immediately, and which parts need explaining that shouldn’t need explaining?
That variance is the data. It tells you which parts of what you’re solving are market-level - patterns that repeat, and problems that exist regardless of which organisation you’re talking to. It tells you which parts are company-level: real, but specific. Worth solving for customer one. Not the thing to build a commercial strategy around.
The companies that get this right treat their first customer as a reference point, not a blueprint. They run market conversations in parallel with product development - not to replace the anchor relationship, but to understand its edges.
The ones that don’t do this arrive at commercialisation already speaking the wrong language.
The Question Worth Asking
Your anchor customer’s endorsement is a signal. It’s just not the signal most founders think it is.
What do you know about your market that you didn’t learn from your first customer?
For most ADS companies trying to commercialise new technologies, the honest answer is: not enough.
More next month.